


Moving On

by Cameron_McKell



Series: Upon Further Review [24]
Category: Tron (1982), Tron (Movies), Tron - All Media Types
Genre: F/M, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Non-Human Humanoid Society, Non-Human Humanoids
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-20
Updated: 2013-11-20
Packaged: 2018-01-02 04:27:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 793
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1052509
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cameron_McKell/pseuds/Cameron_McKell
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There were steps to be taken before he - both of them, really - could move on.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Moving On

Yori watched as, ahead of her, Tron brought his lightcycle to a stop, and dismissed it. While she stopped and walked over, he knelt down, then laid his palm flat against the cavern floor. As was the case each time he did this, she tried to estimate what he saw. What did his inputs – written for system security, so different from her own – detect amongst the smooth, raw data?

 

She rested one hand on his shoulder gently as his gaze swept further inside slowly, and his mouth twisted into a shape too melancholy to classify as a smile.

 

“'On the other side of the screen, it all looks so easy.'” he murmured quietly.

 

“What?” she asked, letting her arm drop back down to her side as he stood again.

 

“Flynn said it, after we arrived here,” Tron clarified, looking back at her. Yori displayed a small, encouraging smile at him, and his expression softened with affection accordingly. He shifted until he could hold her left hand with his right – leaving his left hand, his stronger hand open to grab his disk in the event that harmful glitches or gridbugs had found their way into the area – and they started walking down the tunnel together.

 

Yori knew, down in her base code where her belief in the Users originated, that Tron had needed to take this trip, and trace this path. It normally would have had to wait another 12.7 cycles for their downtimes to synchronize with sufficient time allowances to accommodate the distance, but her User, as if somehow knowing of Tron's growing despondency – which is possible, after Flynn's recent visit – had dismissed her suite early, almost perfectly coordinated with the start of Tron's downtime.

 

She spent the majority of their walk calculating the statistical probability of Flynn intervening on their behalf, but hadn't yet reached a conclusive answer before Tron tugged her to a stop, right at the edge of a glimmering pool of energy.

 

“We stopped here to recharge,” Tron told her, though his gaze lingered on an opening in the cavern above them to the left, before joining them at the pool. Uncharacteristically, he fidgeted, and Yori could read the action conflict causing the movement error in him clearly. The simplest solution was to make the choice for him, so she calmly folded herself down into a seated position, and reached down into the liquid.

 

Tron shuddered minutely, then settled down beside her with his usual economic grace, and lowered his hands, cupped to retain the energy, into the pool. It buzzed refreshingly over their circuits, gradually feeding into their energy reserves through the – admittedly inefficient – contact, until Tron brought his cupped hands up to drink, and she similarly lifted out her one, and they were momentarily caught up in the surge of more direct transference.

 

“We were happy here,” Tron reminisced with a smile, even as a minute amount of energy discharge trickled over his face. Yori's vocal processes locked up temporarily as one of her simulation processes cycled over, unhelpfully sketching in the scene for her: an old friend, a User, and her dedicated pair gathered around the pool to restore themselves, finally smiling and free after breaking out of captivity, and the eventual deresolution that waited for them there, unaware of the deresolution waiting for at least one of them outside.

 

Aware of her own energy discharge accumulating at this point, she leaned over and embraced Tron, felt it as he hunched in on himself, and the soft vocal glitch he'd had since he was just an alpha started up, like a massively down-scaled Recognizer. He turned just enough so that he could return her hold, and vibrated with grief.

 

It took three attempts before she could unlock her vocal processes enough to speak. “Would you prefer to resume this in future downtime, and go back?”

 

“No,” he replied, forcibly reining himself back in, though he couldn't stop the soft purr of that vocal glitch. Once he was mostly back to defaults, he released her and stood, looking past the pool to another tunnel. “Lag won't render the action easier to complete, so we should finish it and move on.”

 

Moving on... Yori smiled slightly at the concept, and stood as well. “Right. Where do we go next, then?”

 

Tron gave her a grateful look, and started walking around the pool. “This way.”

 

Yori followed, focus centered on Tron's back and shoulders, straighter and stronger for having processed through this portion of their path. They continued moving on, down the tunnel which would lead them back out into the canyon, and beyond that, to the termination point of their journey, and a friend, to a goodbye neither of them had had the opportunity to give before.


End file.
